A fellow VCI who was teaching the vSphere 5 What's New training course got a question from a student asking what happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down, because with vSphere 5.0 all the setting for resource pools are "moved" to vCenter.
Andy Cary who works as a Senior Technical Trainer at VMware responded immediately with: I created a RP on my vCenter and turned off expandable reservations for memory. Placed VM1 under said resource pool and failed to power up because the VM need to reserve memory for the overhead of running the VM (had no reservations set on the RP). So next I directly connected to the host and powered on the VM with no problem at all. However when you go back to the vCenter it displays:
The Cluster with the RP is now invalid because it can see the VM has powered on. So the configuration about DRS RP is saved on the vCenter but it doesnât stop you going directly to the host an powering on the VM. Now in vSphere 5.0 if you directly connect to a host and try and create a local resource pool it will throw up an error saying this isnât allowed because it can see you are managed by vCenter, this is the case even if the Host isnât a member of DRS cluster. So the creation and management of RP is done via vCenter, if vCenter goes down the rules cannot be applied so you could get admin powering on VMs by directly connecting to the hosts. So in summary all we have done is said âYou can only create, modify resource pools via vCenter and not by directly connecting to the hostâ
Sunday, January 22. 2012
Video - vCloud Director 1.5 - Quick Start
This quick start video provides a simplified, step-by-step set of instructions for creating a new virtual machine on the StratoGen vCloud platform. The StratoGen vCloud platform is built upon VMware vCloud Director 1.5. This video is a supplement to the vCloud director 1.5 user manual which provides comprehensive information about the platform.
Step 1 > Log in - Using a supported browser (Internet Explorer 7 or above, or Mozilla Firefox 3 or above) connect to the URL as provided by StratoGen. A typical URL is of the format https://mycloud.stratogen.com/cloud/org/your-organisation. Enter the username and password supplied to login to your account.
Step 2 > Select the âMy Cloudâ tab - The initial homepage for your cloud is displayed. Now click on the âMy Cloudâ tab. In the following steps I will take you through the steps required to create a new virtual machine in your cloud. All virtual machines must reside in a vApp (a vApp is a container that holds 1 or more virtual machines).
Step 3 > Click the â+â symbol to create a new vApp from a catalog. You will now create a new vApp by clicking on the + icon
Step 4 > Select Catalog - You can upload your own virtual machine templates or ISO installation media into your organizationâs catalog, but in this example we will be using one of the pre-built templates supplied by StratoGen. Click on the catalog drop down list and select âPublic catalogsâ.
Step 5 > Select vApp Template - Select the required operating system from the list of vApp Templates. In this example we will be creating a virtual machine with CentOS 5.5 installed, so we select the CentOS 5.5 vApp. This will create a vApp which contains a single CentOS 5.5 virtual machine.
Step 6 > Name your vApp - Enter a name for your new vApp, and a short description if required.
Step 7 > Configure virtual machine - Enter a computer name for your new virtual machine and then click on the âNetworkâ drop down list to select a network to attach it to. In this instance we will select a âDirect Internet Connectionâ. Always leave the IP assignment as âStatic â IP Poolâ. We are now ready to create our vApp and virtual machine. Click âFinishâ.
Step 8 > vApp creation - Thatâs it. Your new vApp and virtual machine will now be created. Your virtual machineâs network settings will be configured automatically and a new root/administrator password will be automatically generated and assigned. We will also review our new virtual machine and note our new password.
Step 9 > vApp display - Once the creation of your vApp has completed, âStoppedâ will be displayed as the status. Select the vApp, and then click on the name. A visual depiction of the vApp is displayed. Now click the âVirtual Machinesâ tab.
Step 10 > Virtual machine properties - This tab shows us the virtual machines in the vApp. In our case this is a single virtual machine called CentOS 5.5. Right click on your virtual machine and select properties. We can now view the properties of our virtual machine. To find the newly assigned root/administrator password for your VM select the âGuest OS Customizationâ tab. Your new password is displayed after the âAuto generate passwordâ text.
Step 1 > Log in - Using a supported browser (Internet Explorer 7 or above, or Mozilla Firefox 3 or above) connect to the URL as provided by StratoGen. A typical URL is of the format https://mycloud.stratogen.com/cloud/org/your-organisation. Enter the username and password supplied to login to your account.
Step 2 > Select the âMy Cloudâ tab - The initial homepage for your cloud is displayed. Now click on the âMy Cloudâ tab. In the following steps I will take you through the steps required to create a new virtual machine in your cloud. All virtual machines must reside in a vApp (a vApp is a container that holds 1 or more virtual machines).
Step 3 > Click the â+â symbol to create a new vApp from a catalog. You will now create a new vApp by clicking on the + icon
Step 4 > Select Catalog - You can upload your own virtual machine templates or ISO installation media into your organizationâs catalog, but in this example we will be using one of the pre-built templates supplied by StratoGen. Click on the catalog drop down list and select âPublic catalogsâ.
Step 5 > Select vApp Template - Select the required operating system from the list of vApp Templates. In this example we will be creating a virtual machine with CentOS 5.5 installed, so we select the CentOS 5.5 vApp. This will create a vApp which contains a single CentOS 5.5 virtual machine.
Step 6 > Name your vApp - Enter a name for your new vApp, and a short description if required.
Step 7 > Configure virtual machine - Enter a computer name for your new virtual machine and then click on the âNetworkâ drop down list to select a network to attach it to. In this instance we will select a âDirect Internet Connectionâ. Always leave the IP assignment as âStatic â IP Poolâ. We are now ready to create our vApp and virtual machine. Click âFinishâ.
Step 8 > vApp creation - Thatâs it. Your new vApp and virtual machine will now be created. Your virtual machineâs network settings will be configured automatically and a new root/administrator password will be automatically generated and assigned. We will also review our new virtual machine and note our new password.
Step 9 > vApp display - Once the creation of your vApp has completed, âStoppedâ will be displayed as the status. Select the vApp, and then click on the name. A visual depiction of the vApp is displayed. Now click the âVirtual Machinesâ tab.
Step 10 > Virtual machine properties - This tab shows us the virtual machines in the vApp. In our case this is a single virtual machine called CentOS 5.5. Right click on your virtual machine and select properties. We can now view the properties of our virtual machine. To find the newly assigned root/administrator password for your VM select the âGuest OS Customizationâ tab. Your new password is displayed after the âAuto generate passwordâ text.
Saturday, January 21. 2012
White Paper - Mobility and Disaster Recovery Solution for Virtualized Tier-1 Enterprise Applications
To meet ever growing IT infrastructure needs and to ensure business continuity in case of a site-level disaster, it is critical to have live mobility and fully automated, efficient disaster recovery (DR) processes for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers. Failure to have a robust and efficient mobility and fully automated disaster recovery solution can result in millions of dollars of lost revenue and employee productivity.
This white paper showcases a flexible solution from CiscoÂź, VMwareÂź, and EMCÂź that allows customers to efficiently achieve live mobility and fully automated DR for virtualized enterprise applications across data centers with less than 10ms round-trip time (RTT) latency between them.
Live mobility for virtualized applications across data centers enables IT organizations to efficiently meet various operational needs, e.g., data capacity expansion, seamless migrations, disaster avoidance, etc.
Fully automated DR allows customers to protect their mission critical enterprise applications against site-level disasters and ensures business continuance. A key advantage of this solution over manual, runbook style DR process execution is "minimum downtime with lowest Recovery Time Objective (RTO)". This is extremely critical for next generation cloud solutions required to host hundreds to thousands of virtualized applications on the same shared infrastructure.
The Cisco, VMware, and EMC design presented in this white paper is very modular so that, based on customer requirements, there is flexibility to deploy both the live mobility and fully automated DR solution or deploy any one of these solutions.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/DCI/4.0/EMC/mobdisasterrecapps.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/DCI/4.0/EMC/mobdisasterrecapps.html
Friday, January 20. 2012
Video - Install vSphere Syslog Collector and configure ESXi logging
Logging in vSphere 5.0 has been significantly enhanced. You now have fine-grained control over system logs, the location where logs are sent, and, for each log, default size and rotation policy. You can set up logging with the vSphere Client or with the esxcli system syslog command and the PowerCLI VMHostSysLogServer Commandlets. You can also set up logging behaviour for a host by using the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Client and can then import that host profile into other hosts.
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 hosts run a syslog service (vmsyslogd) which provides a standard mechanism for logging messages from the VMkernel and other system components. By default in ESXi, these logs are placed on a local scratch volume or a ram disk. To preserve the logs further, ESXi can be configured to place these logs to an alternate storage location on disk, and to send the logs across the network to a syslog server.
You have to install the vSphere Syslog Collector to enable ESXi system logs to be directed to a server on the network, rather than to a local disk. Itâs possible install the Syslog Collector on the same machine as the associated vCenter Server, or on a different machine that has network connection to the vCenter Server. The Syslog Collector service binds to an IPv4 address for communication with vCenter Server, and does not support IPv6. The vCenter Server can be on a host machine in an IPv4-only, IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode, or IPv6-only network environment, but the machine that connects to the vCenter Server through the vSphere Client must have an IPv4 address for the Syslog Collector service to work.
In the ESXi Software panel there's an Advanced Setting called Syslog.global.LogHost, the value of this setting presents the remote host to which syslog messages are forwarded and port on which the remote host receives syslog messages. You can include the protocol and the port, for example, ssl://hostName1:514. UDP (default), TCP, and SSL are supported. The remote host must have syslog installed and correctly configured to receive the forwarded syslog messages. Checkout the video how the syslog service is installed on the vCenter host.
You can also set up ESXi Syslog from the Host Profiles Interface. Hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy usually do not have sufficient local storage to save system logs. You can specify a remote syslog server for those hosts by setting up a reference host, saving the host profile, and applying that host profile to other hosts as needed. Best practice is to set up the syslog server on the reference host with the vSphere Client or the esxcli system syslog command and save the host profile. In some situations, setting up syslog from the Host Profiles interface is an alternative.
Thursday, January 19. 2012
Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 - The Rough Cuts
The Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.
vSphere Storage is the essential component that glues the vSphere environment together. Most of the enterprise, as well as basic features, in vSphere require some sort of storage, be it local, remote, dedicated, or shared. The larger the environment, the more complex the storage design and choices. The author's approach is two-fold. He will first demystify the âblack-boxâ called storage in the vSphere environment. He will then provide illustrated step-by-step procedures for doing common tasks that will gradually introduce more complex tasks. Based on the vSphere 5 release.
Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 by Mostafa Khalil Published Jan 10, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press series.
Table of Contents Part 1: Storage 1. Storage Types 2. Protocols and Standards 3. Storage Connectivity and Media 4. VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) 5. 3rd party Multipathing Plug-ins 6. Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) 7. LUN Sizing Design Decisions and Best Practices 8. Performance Optimization Monitoring Part 2: File Systems 9. VMFS 10. NFS 11. VisorFS Part 3: Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) 12. Concept and Architecture 13. Design Decisions for using SVAs Part 4: Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) 14. Virtual Machines and Applications Clustering 15. Metro Clusters and Stretch Clusters 16. Standby Servers (Blades) 17. Disaster Recovery Design
vSphere Storage is the essential component that glues the vSphere environment together. Most of the enterprise, as well as basic features, in vSphere require some sort of storage, be it local, remote, dedicated, or shared. The larger the environment, the more complex the storage design and choices. The author's approach is two-fold. He will first demystify the âblack-boxâ called storage in the vSphere environment. He will then provide illustrated step-by-step procedures for doing common tasks that will gradually introduce more complex tasks. Based on the vSphere 5 release.
Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 by Mostafa Khalil Published Jan 10, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press series.
Table of Contents Part 1: Storage 1. Storage Types 2. Protocols and Standards 3. Storage Connectivity and Media 4. VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) 5. 3rd party Multipathing Plug-ins 6. Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) 7. LUN Sizing Design Decisions and Best Practices 8. Performance Optimization Monitoring Part 2: File Systems 9. VMFS 10. NFS 11. VisorFS Part 3: Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) 12. Concept and Architecture 13. Design Decisions for using SVAs Part 4: Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) 14. Virtual Machines and Applications Clustering 15. Metro Clusters and Stretch Clusters 16. Standby Servers (Blades) 17. Disaster Recovery Design
Monday, January 16. 2012
Top 25 Free Tools for VMware vSphere presented by David Davis and Kendrick Coleman
In this live webinar, vExperts David Davis and Kendrick Coleman share their list of 25 best free tools for VMware vSphere management, reporting, performance, scripting and more. Whether you're an experienced virtualization pro or someone just getting started with VMware administration, you'll benefit from learning about these 25 completely free tools.
http://www.trainsignal.com/blog/webinars